Another Errol Flynn movie on TCM - Charge of the Light Brigade. Classic 1940s movie making. Classic late 30s Hollywood bad history. It makes you wonder. For as much as adults complaining today about "dem young'uns not knowing their history" and all that, just what the heck were they thinking back in the 1930s-1940s? Custer and Jeb Stuart were best friends who captured John Brown? In reality, they never met. Charge of the Light Brigade is equally fast on it's feet with the truth. The massacre the brigade is supposedly avenging occurred three years AFTER the Battle of Balaclava. And, apparently, unbeknownst to the British, the Light Brigade actually won the engagement. And colonial Britain looks a lot like the Mohave Desert. On the other hand, it was another staple of "Family Classics" when I was growing up.
Anyway, another Errol movie when he was at the beginning of the high point of his career. This was his first movie after his breakout film, Captain Blood. And how could you lose with a cast like this. Olivia DeHavilland, David Niven, Patric Knowles, Donald Crisp. It even had a real princess in it - Princess Baba, the youngest daughter of Sir Charles Vyner de Windt Brooke (1874-1963), last British Rajah of Sarawak.
This film was one of several Flynn films directed by Michael Curtiz. I agree with one reviewer of Curtiz' work, who commented "... Curtiz's vision of any movie... was almost totally a visual one", and quotes him as saying, "Who cares about character? I make it go so fast nobody notices". This is a pretty good assessment of several Flynn movies, where the main actors (Flynn, in particular) played fairly cardboard, two-dimensional characters, while big action scenes dominated the film. In watching Charge of the Light Brigade a few times, you'd be tempted to wonder if Curtiz' entire idea for the movie was to film the huge cavalry charge at the end, and then film another 75 minutes of filler around it. It's hard to believe this is the same guy who directed Casablanca.
Final note: unlike the rest of Errol Flynn's blockbuster films, because of the use of trip wires and the number of horses killed in the film, The Charge Of The Light Brigade was never re-released by Warner Brothers.
No comments:
Post a Comment